Palazzo party

Venice

I may have spoken too soon. Venice is also a good place for a party. The only trouble with Venezia is that anything one writes about the place has already been written. Even what I’ve just said has been said a thousand times. Original pronouncements about the Dresden of the south are rare; as rare, in fact, as men who have served their country among the slobs of New Labour. But let’s not be beastly to the barbarians. Or even think about them. Not here, in one of the most historic city-states of the Western world.

After Greece and Rome went down the Swanee, it was the creativity of Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries that became the driving force of Western civilisation. Venice was right up there, holding her own and managing to remain independent, unlike her neighbours Milan, Siena and Florence, who had fallen to the Papacy. The man who pissed me off the most, however, was a Venetian Shylock Doge by the name of Enrico Dandolo, who infamously had financed the Fourth Crusade to capture Constantinople from the infidels. The fact that there were no infidels there did not bother the mercenaries. The booty included our beautiful bronze lions, now guarding the pigeons in San Marco. Dandolo was a real prick. He came to power aged 85, blind but greedy as hell. He built the Palazzo Dandolo on the Grand Canal, and every time I pass by it, I think of Dandolo and forget about the greedy types of today.